The cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden peaked on a Thursday, which was, according to the email Donna had received from the garden's newsletter, the optimal window for viewing.
She'd mentioned it on a Friday evening without any particular emphasis, the way she mentioned things that she found interesting but wasn't making demands about. Scott had said: Sunday, then. She'd looked at him. He'd added: No case files. She'd said: Ambitious.
Sunday morning, no case files. He'd verified this by leaving his briefcase at the apartment and bringing only his phone in his coat pocket, which was a different thing than no phone but was the closest approximation available.
They took the 2 train to Eastern Parkway and walked from the station through a neighborhood that was becoming its April version — garbage bags giving way to window boxes, a fruit stand on the corner doing serious business in strawberries, a kid on a bike with a streaming phone on the handlebars playing something that sounded like a weather report.
Donna had her arm through his and was talking about the Leighton & Mark follow-up meeting she'd had on Friday — the client had approved her structural recommendation and the design and marketing teams had their first joint session in eight months and apparently it had been, per the marketing director's email to Margaret Friedman, unexpectedly productive, which Donna was filing as an understatement.
"Unexpectedly," Scott said.
"That's the word he used."
"He expected it to be a disaster."
"He expected to sit in a room with people he'd never actually worked with and have nothing to say to each other. Instead they stayed three hours." She paused. "I told him that's what happens when you give people the permission to need each other."
The garden entrance was on Washington Avenue, a set of gates that opened into the immediate contrast of a city that had been replaced by something else — quieter, greener, the sound of the street falling away within thirty feet of the gate.
The Japanese Garden was on the left. The cherry allée ran through the middle of the park, the trees at full bloom, petals dropping in slow intermittent release that the breeze organized into something decorative. People were moving through with phones up, trying to capture what was better experienced than recorded.
Scott did not take out his phone.
He was aware of the System running passively at the edge of his attention — ambient monitoring, the kind of background hum that had become as natural as his own heartbeat. He was also aware that the garden was, in a specific technical sense, not providing any data worth processing.
He let it idle.
Donna pulled him off the main path into the Japanese Garden proper. The lily pool was just beginning to show green at its surface. A toddler in a red coat was crouching at the edge of the pool with the intense focused attention of someone who had found something important, supervised by a parent who was also crouching, also looking, also treating the pool with appropriate seriousness.
Donna made a quiet sound — something between an exhale and a laugh — watching the toddler.
"That," she said.
"What?"
"That's what I want. Someday. In whatever form it takes." She didn't look at him. She was still watching the toddler, who had now decided to stand up and begin pursuit of a duck that had wandered over from the far bank. "Not immediately. But someday."
Scott watched the duck relocate with the practiced indifference of a park animal who had been chased by toddlers professionally. "The duck?"
"The whole picture." She looked at him then. "Don't be obtuse."
"I'm not being obtuse. I was genuinely asking about the duck."
She walked ahead of him on the narrow path, which meant he followed, which was fine.
They came through the Cranford Rose Garden — not yet in bloom, just the trellis structure and the beginning of green — and turned past the overlook onto the path that curved south toward the far end of the park.
The Palm House appeared around the corner.
Donna stopped.
The conservatory was glass from base to peak, Victorian in proportion — a structure that had decided several centuries ago what it was going to look like and had not reconsidered. The morning light came through the glass panels at an angle that turned the interior green into something visible and warm. The magnolias on either side of the arched entrance were in full bloom, white flowers against the glass behind them, petals on the path in front.
She stood and looked at it.
Scott stood and looked at her looking at it.
Ten seconds. He counted. Not the System counting — him.
"This is it," she said.
He looked at the Palm House. The building was objectively beautiful. It was also a building with which he had no prior research, no venue comparison data, no capacity analysis, no catering infrastructure assessment, no understanding of whether October booking was available.
"You haven't seen the inside," he said.
"I know."
"There are approximately—"
"Scott."
He stopped.
She turned to him with the expression she used for the moments when his instinct to analyze something into safety required gentle redirection. Not impatient — patient with the specific quality of someone who knew him well enough to know when patience was the right response.
"I walked into this garden this morning with no plan," she said. "We turned a corner and I saw it. That's how I knew about the Leighton solution — I read the org chart and I just knew. That's how I knew about us — I turned a corner at Harvey's firm and you were standing in the hallway, and I knew." She put her hand flat against his chest. "Some things don't need a calculation. They need someone who trusts what she's seeing."
The System was running the venue analysis before she finished the sentence. Capacity: 320 seated. Average venue booking lead time: 8-14 months. October 2014 availability: unknown without direct inquiry.
He dismissed it.
All of it.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"This is it."
She smiled — the kind that arrived in her eyes before her mouth, the kind that made him understand entirely why the phrase light up a room existed in the language.
They went inside.
The events coordinator was a woman named Claire — mid-forties, efficient in the specific way of someone who had been turning impractical venues into practical events for twenty years. She was not expecting a couple in jeans and winter coats to appear at her desk on a Sunday morning in late April.
Donna introduced them in thirty seconds and had Claire showing them the space within two minutes.
Scott watched it happen with the appreciation he reserved for watching genuinely skilled people operate. Donna didn't charm Claire by performing warmth — she charmed her by being specific: asking about logistics with genuine curiosity, noting the acoustics, asking about the practical question of how the palm canopy looked in afternoon versus evening light.
Claire told them October light came through the western panels from three PM onward. "The afternoon session," she said. "That's when people cry."
Donna stood in the center of the conservatory, under the canopy of palms that rose to the glass ceiling, afternoon light hypothetical but already present in the way she was looking at it.
She turned to Scott. He was already looking at her.
"The ceremony here," she said. "Under the canopy."
"Yes."
"Reception in the connecting hall."
"Yes."
She looked at Claire. "October 18th?"
Claire checked the calendar on her tablet. Scott could see the line of available dates from where he was standing.
"October 18th is available," Claire said.
"Done," Donna said.
Scott wrote the deposit check. His hand was completely steady, which surprised him slightly. He'd been nervous about the proposal for three weeks. He wasn't nervous about this.
Maybe some things were just true in a way that didn't produce anxiety. The proposal had the 6% because he'd been afraid of being wrong about something he wasn't wrong about. The venue had no percentage because Donna had already made the decision and she was right, and he'd stopped needing to verify it.
Claire handed them the contract. Scott read it — he was still a lawyer — and found two clauses that were imprecise and flagged them for minor revision. Claire produced a corrected version in eight minutes with the efficiency of someone who had been asked to revise contracts by lawyers before.
He signed.
Walking back through the garden, petals on the path, Donna's arm through his, the city a sound rather than a presence.
"October 18th," she said.
"Five months."
"Are you nervous?"
He thought about the question honestly. The System might have run a probability on his physiological indicators if he'd let it. He didn't let it.
"Yes," he said. "And happy. And nervous about being happy. Because when you have something real to lose, you become aware of the losing."
Donna was quiet for a moment.
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said," she said.
"I'm trying to be more honest about the things the System can't help with."
"How's that going?"
"Better than the probability suggested."
She laughed. He felt it through her arm against his.
He texted Louis from the gate: Palm House. Brooklyn Botanic Garden. October 18th.
The response arrived before they reached the street.
I'LL HANDLE EVERYTHING.
Donna read it over his shoulder. "He's going to plan the most aggressively perfect wedding New York has ever seen."
"We're going to let him."
"We are absolutely going to let him." She pulled him toward the subway entrance. "And when he sends us a seventeen-point catering checklist at two in the morning, we're going to be grateful."
"Very grateful."
"Because that's Louis loving us."
"That's Louis loving us," Scott agreed.
They went down into the station. Somewhere above them, the cherry blossoms kept dropping without instruction, organizing themselves into something beautiful without needing to be told how, which was, Scott thought, approximately right.
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